As the components of semiconductor devices shrink to smaller and smaller sizes, now on the order of nanometers, the ability to improve metrology performance, productivity, and device correlation becomes ever so important. Old methods for determining film, critical dimensions (CD), and overlay metrology involved independent metrology of film, CD, and overlay on different targets and did not rely on the commonality of data and sampling between metrology paradigms. The disadvantages involved with these older methods included the need for occupying a large amount of scribe space; a slow move, acquire, and measurement (MAM) time; and limited modeling performance due to the need to float multiple parameters.
It is within this context that embodiments of the present invention arise.